What Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” Can Teach the Modern Worker

Dale Carnegie treated the employee-employer relationship as a sacred, symbiotic bond. In today’s economy, work is structured more like a string of one-night stands.

Illustration by Oliver Munday

Before Dale Carnegie wrote one of the best-selling business books of all
time, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” he founded his own
school, the Dale Carnegie Center for Excellence, in 1912. With the
book’s success—it has reportedly been purchased more than thirty million
times since its initial publication, in 1936—the school expanded; it now
has branches in ninety countries and in all fifty states, and offers
courses like “Confident, Assertive, and in Charge,” “How to Communicate
with Diplomacy and Tact,” and “How to Win Friends and Influence
(Business) People.” Warren Buffett, the billionaire and investment
banker, attended the school and credits it for his success. “In my
office, you will not see the degree I have from the University of
Nebraska, or the master’s degree I have from Columbia University, but
you’ll see the certificate I got from the Dale Carnegie course,” Buffett
told a documentary film crew. The courses usually cost fifteen
hundred dollars or more, but the schools regularly host free sessions for
prospective students. On a recent Monday evening, I decided to go to
one.

The Manhattan branch of the Dale Carnegie Institute is housed in a
basement of an Upper East Side high-rise. When I arrived, two women in
dark suits cheerfully handed me a name tag. Names were important to Dale
Carnegie; several of the success stories in his book are about people
with a gift for remembering them. Carnegie was certain that if you
repeated someone’s name, a lot, they would invariably begin to like you;
that a name said repeatedly was like a love spell. “Remember that a
person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in
any language,” he wrote.

I was directed to Classroom B, a windowless room with worn gray
carpeting. There were twenty or so students sitting on folding chairs,
white name tags adhered to their button-down shirts, obedient and eager.

I had read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” for the first time
a few weeks prior, and had struggled to finish it. Carnegie’s thinking
is as predictable as that of a golden retriever who leaves a tennis ball
at your feet. His great epiphany is that when you are nice to people
they are more likely to be nice back. My kindergarten teacher had
covered similar ground.

Most of the other students were men, and most of them wore suits. Many
had come with colleagues, forming corporate cliques. There was a crew
from Citibank, one from Chase, and one from the drugstore Duane Reade.
They all seemed to have read Carnegie’s book. Not everyone had found it
revelatory, but they blamed the medium rather than Carnegie’s
methodology: they thought a class might be a better way to absorb his
ideas—after all, school had been Carnegie’s original method of
evangelism. One of the men sitting near me worked in the accounting
department at the bank HSBC. He explained that his cubicle
neighbors worked in different departments and he had little reason to
speak with them. He’d become so accustomed to communicating by e-mail or
chat that he felt he needed a refresher in basic conversation skills.

The man sitting next to me had shaggy hair and a friendly face. He was a
musician, a singer-songwriter, who supported himself as a real-estate
broker. He’d been losing clients over the past few years. He’d found
that people preferred browsing listings online for free to interacting
with an agent for money. He had been trying to plan his next career move
and came across an online flyer for a free Dale Carnegie class. “Free,”
he repeated, as though it explained everything. He had always worked for
himself. “I never thought of myself as a natural leader,” he told me.
“It’s kind of amazing that you can just learn to be one.”

Our instructor was a middle-aged woman in a dark pants suit with a
sturdy, windproof bob. She congratulated us for being there. “Everyone
here works for a company, or wants to work for a company,” she said.
Everyone’s name tag listed an employer. (Mine read, “Book.”)

The Carnegie school assumes that everyone aspires to work at a
corporation with clear hierarchies and ladders to climb. The flyer that
the musician/realtor found online had said that the class was intended
for “employees at all levels in a corporation who seek to maximize their
performance, become stronger leaders, and add more value to the
organization.” The class, and Carnegie’s book, are designed for a
particular kind of striver, one struggling to get noticed by higher-ups.
They are intended, in other words, for a kind of workplace, and worker,
that may not exist for much longer. But, when Carnegie began peddling
his particular brand of optimism during the Great Depression, a stable
corporate job was the ultimate dream, and his readers were willing to
sacrifice anything for it.

Carnegie was born Dale Carnegey in 1888 in Maryville, a small town in
northwest Missouri. His parents were farmers, and it was his job to milk
the cows each morning before school. The Carnegeys grew their own fruits
and vegetables, butchered and smoked their own pigs, and traded their
eggs and milk for coffee and sugar. They scraped by, barely. Dale hated
farmwork and spent his childhood trying to finagle his way out of it.
“Above all else, I hated to chop wood,” he wrote, according to his
biographer Steven Watts. “I despised it so bitterly that we would never
have any firewood stored up in advance.”

When he was sixteen, the family moved to Warrensburg, in southeast
Missouri, where there was a free university. Dale enrolled as soon as
his family arrived in town; he planned to become a teacher one day.
During his first year, he had a massive growth spurt and outgrew all of
his clothes, and his parents didn’t have the money to buy him new ones.
He looked ridiculous with his long limbs and broad, half-moon ears.
Girls ignored him; they tended to go for the athletes—the confident,
brawny types. But Dale noticed that the school’s top debaters, even the
scrawny ones, had decent luck with women. With nothing to lose, he
joined one of the school’s literary fraternities, which hosted
public-speaking tournaments on campus.

He bombed his first competition. “I was so crushed, so beaten, so
despondent, that I literally thought of suicide!” he recalled, years
later. “Sounds silly? Not when you are seventeen or eighteen and
suffering from an inferiority complex!”

He practiced obsessively. He’d recite famous speeches as he milked the
cows and rode his horse to school. It paid off: in his third year of
college, he won the school’s debate championship. He was elected
student-body vice president and was invited to deliver sermons at
churches around Warrensburg. He even got his first girlfriend.

His mother hoped that he’d become a missionary or a preacher. But
instead, Dale became a salesman—he didn’t want to be poor, like his
parents. He travelled across the Midwest, selling home-education courses
to ranchers. He had a knack for sales and soon moved on to more lucrative
wares, like bacon, soap, and lard.

By twenty-three, he’d saved enough money to move to New York and enroll
in drama school. He didn’t want to be an actor, per se, but he thought
he could be a public speaker, reciting stories and poems before crowds.
His dream was to join the Chautauqua lecture circuit, an ensemble road
show of public intellectuals and storytellers who performed in makeshift
tents across America. Their most coveted speaker was William Jennings
Bryan, a two-time candidate for president; crowds were wild for his
essay on temperance. It was a potentially lucrative career, but Dale’s
family didn’t approve. His mother believed that only heathens performed
on stage. “It is far nobler work than selling meat,” he assured her.

In 1911, he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts,
considered one of the most prestigious theatre schools in the country,
where he learned, among other things, how to imitate a chair. He tried
out for various theatre productions but could never land a part. He
began teaching public-speaking classes at the Y.M.C.A. so he could stay
solvent until his theatre career took off. He developed a reputation as
a masterful teacher, and the classes took up more and more of his time.
Thousands of students signed up to take his “Effective Speaking and
Human Relations” class. He helped salesmen perfect their pitch and
businessmen steady their nerves before a big presentation; he taught his
students how to summon courage when they were nervous and feign
confidence when they were sick with terror. He was heralded as a
magician, one who could turn an awkward loaf into a charmer, or coach a
wallflower into the spotlight. He became an expert on communication and
management, even though he’d never been a manager. He had spent his
career gigging, cobbling together an income between teaching, lecturing,
and writing: he had no knowledge of what it was like to commute to the
same office to do the same job day after day and year after year. And
yet, he became a world-renowned expert in achieving corporate success.

In 1915, Dale collected his lectures and notes into a book: “Public
Speaking: A Practical Course for Businessmen.” Later that year, he
registered for the draft, but he was ineligible for active duty because
he was missing the top of his left index finger, from an accident as a
child, and he was assigned to an administrative post at a Long Island
military base. After the war, he accepted a job as a business manager
for a theatre troupe. While on tour through Europe, he met Lolita
Baucaire, a German actress. They married in 1921, and settled in Paris,
where they lived on the royalties for his first book, and Dale worked on
a novel that he never published. (They divorced in 1931.) When he
returned to New York in 1926, to resume his public-speaking classes, he
changed his last name to Carnegie. He thought the new spelling made his
name easier to remember. (By then, he’d already developed his theory
about the importance of names.) An editor from Simon & Schuster
encouraged him to write a book about “the art of getting along with
people” that would include a collection of his public-speaking lessons,
as well as new materials. It was Carnegie who came up with the book’s
title: “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

When “How to Win Friends and Influence People” was published, in 1936,
unemployment in America was at 16.9 per cent. It was the tail end of the
Great Depression, and virtually no one was hiring. Those with jobs were
frantic to hold onto them, and Carnegie’s book included some sound advice for those trying not to get fired. Among its first lessons, for
instance, is don’t “criticize, condemn, or complain.” Carnegie offers
six rules for getting people to like you, and they all encourage
flattery and pleasantries. Rule #1: “Become genuinely interested in
other people.” Rule #2: “Smile!” He has twelve additional rules for
“winning people to your way of thinking.” Rule #1: “The only way to get
the best of an argument is to avoid it.” Rule #7: “Let the other person
feel that the idea is his or hers.” Carnegie advised that people aspire
to be—to borrow Chesterfield’s favorite adjective—“easy”; that they
learn to blend in.

Carnegie’s book is a compendium of case studies of great men and their
achievements, men like Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Lloyd
George, Great Britain’s Prime Minister during the First World War. He
writes that true leaders tread softly. They ask questions and never bark
orders; they heap praise upon their employees and never dwell on their
mistakes; they are self-effacing and encouraging and never imperious or
cruel. They are authoritative but gentle. His book argues that kindness,
often considered a liability in the workplace, is actually an asset.
Carnegie had found that men were socialized to think that being brutish
and loud was the only way to demonstrate readiness for power. Offices
functioned like one perpetual rush session, like laboratories of
aggressive showmanship. He argues, instead, that politeness is the most
effective tactic for getting ahead. “Why, I wonder, don’t we use the
same common sense when trying to change people that we use when trying
to change dogs?” he writes. “Why don’t we use praise instead of
condemnation?”

While Carnegie writes about great men, his book is largely intended for
their employees. And although Carnegie’s advice was applicable to the
fearful workers of the Great Depression, the book does not read as if it
was written during a difficult or dire moment. It is a happy book. “Dale
Carnegie sells people what most of them desperately need,” the Saturday
Evening Post declared in a 1937 profile. “He sells them hope.” Much of
that can be attributed to Carnegie’s zippy prose. (“Skeptical? Well, I
like skeptical people.”) He offers no prognosis of the economy, no dour,
grandfatherly reminders about it being “hard out there.” He seems to
have no awareness of how hard it really was.

Carnegie was not the first person to evangelize about the power of
optimism. In the mid-eighteen-hundreds, a group of psychologists,
philosophers, and religious leaders formed what they called the school
of New Thought. They believed in the power of “mind-cures,” in the
efficacy of determination and grit. The psychologist William James, who
popularized the ideas of the New Thought movement, wrote of the
“all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes.” He argued that if you
mustered your mental powers and stayed focussed, you could achieve
anything—wealth, social success, popularity. Positivity could even heal
a cold.

Carnegie often cites James in his books and lessons. “You don’t feel
like smiling?” he writes. “Then what? Two things. First, force yourself
to smile. If you are alone, force yourself to whistle or hum a tune or
sing. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you
happy.” He is citing one of James’s theories that our facial expressions
determine our mood as well as indicate it. Carnegie believed that our
actions dictate our thoughts, that we can train ourselves to be happy,
smart, and productive by behaving as if we are. If managers treated
their employees as if they were competent, they would become competent. If employees treated their managers as if they were wise and
compassionate, they would stop behaving like tyrants. All anyone wants,
Carnegie writes, is to feel appreciated. If you’re generous with your
perceptions of others, you can have all the friends and influence in the
world.

The cult of positive thinking has outlived Carnegie. The most prominent
example is probably “The Secret,” Rhonda Byrne’s self-help philosophy,
which claims that one can will an outcome into existence simply by
wanting it badly enough. “The Benefits of Optimism Are Real,” read a
recent headline for an Atlantic article that summarized the latest
psychological research on positive thinking. Ruminating and venting, the
article finds, have no tangible benefits, but cheerful resilience pays
dividends.

There is, however, another school of behavioral psychology, which
believes too much optimism makes you soft. It can zap your motivation—if
you’re certain that life will turn out as you hope, then you don’t have
the same hunger to try. Gabriele Oettingen, a psychologist at New York
University, studied a group of women enrolled in a weight-reduction
program and found that it was the pessimists who lost the most weight.
“Dreaming about the future calms you down . . . but it also can drain you of
the energy you need to take action in pursuit of your goals,” Oettingen
concluded.

Many have questioned Carnegie’s theory about the necessity of kindness
in the workplace. Today’s business advice catering to women, for
instance, is essentially reverse-Carnegie. “Be a good listener,” he
advises. “Encourage others to talk about themselves.” But studies today
show that men interrupt their female colleagues with far greater
frequency than their female colleagues interrupt them, and Sheryl
Sandberg and other ambassadors of female ambition urge women who want to
climb the corporate ladder to speak up. Likewise, Carnegie encouraged his readers to be perpetually deferential: “The unvarnished truth is
that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in
some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realize in some
subtle way that you recognize their importance.” Yet Sandberg, among
others, advises women to develop their confidence and guard themselves
from men who take credit for their ideas.

There are other ways in which Carnegie’s advice seems outdated. By the
year 2020, forty per cent of American workers will be freelancers,
according to a study conducted by the software company Intuit. That
means they’ll make their income much as Carnegie himself did, cobbling
together gigs from different clients and projects. Corporate loyalty is
more fleeting today than it was in Carnegie’s day. There’s been a shift
to individual “brands,” with employees, at all ranks, trying to create a
distinct identity online. In this new era of heightened individualism,
corporations have had to offer new perks and toys—gourmet food,
expensive coffee—to instill company camaraderie.

But most companies don’t make such efforts, and most businesses aren’t
trying to retain their workforce. “Fifty years ago, when you went to
business school, you were taught that you want a loyal, dedicated,
skilled workforce,” Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the
Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at U.C. Santa Barbara,
told the Los Angeles Times. “Today, if you go to business school, they tell
you [you] don’t want a permanent workforce. That’s considered new
standard operating procedure.”

Carnegie treated the employee-employer relationship as a sacred,
symbiotic bond. In today’s economy, work is structured more like a
string of one-night stands.

On the other hand, Carnegie’s ideas about the importance of emotional
intelligence and positivity are, perhaps, more apt than ever for the
uncertainties of the modern freelance market. Jobs are changing; careers
that don’t exist today will be in demand a decade from now. The modern
worker of the post-Fordist era has to be easy to work with and open to
change. Some years ago, I wrote an article about ex-convicts trying to
start their own businesses and turn their lives around. There were seven
subjects in total, and each had read “How to Win Friends and Influence
People” upon getting out of prison. One of the men, who had served
twenty years for a jewelry heist and read a lot of self-help, told me
that Carnegie’s book was the only thing he’d found that made it seem
possible to start over.

In the class at the Dale Carnegie Institute, we memorized each other’s
names and practiced enunciating our own. We learned an elaborate “visual
mnemonic” to help us memorize Carnegie’s principles for success. I
forgot it within seconds. Our instructor peppered her lecture with
moralistic maxims like, “You have two ears and one mouth for a reason.”
For the last exercise of the night, we wrote down our goals and shared
them with a partner. The realtor/musician wanted to record more songs. I
wanted to finish my book and do more overseas reporting. Then we had to
make a list of everything we were going to change about ourselves to
accomplish those goals. That was the real goal. We could all be more
industrious, more tenacious, more direct. All we had to do was try.

This piece was drawn from “Asking for a Friend: Three Centuries of
Advice on Life, Love, Money and Other Burning Questions from a Nation
Obsessed,” by Jessica Weisberg, which is out this month from Nation
Books.